Let's pick up where we left off in the last blog post, as I continue to share my journey with you of working on this latest watercolor & encaustic collection, Honor Thy Father & Mother.
This collection is meant to honor my Mom & Dad who have both passed in recent years. And with an even wider brushstroke, it's also meant to honor all those who have lifted us up, supported & cared for us over the years.
If there's one thing I hope to do with this collection, is that by reading about memories & recollections I have had of my Mom & Dad, that it rekindle fond memories of those you love.
Mom loved butterflies 🦋🦋🦋 Dad was passionate about the color red 🍅🌹 and they both had big, beautiful hearts ❤🧡💛💚💙💜
So keeping that in mind, let's move onto the next layers & steps of "unfolding" this new butterfly collection...
But first I'd like to share with you two of my favorite photos with them. The one on the left is me with my Dad, Herschel Toland. It was my wedding as you can probably tell! This was taken on November 3, 2001. The photo on the right is one with my Mom, Marilyn Toland at a family wedding. I'm thinking this one was taken in 2013. They were precious to me ❤
So let's get this party started. The process shots I'm going to share with you today are of the two final pieces in this collection. They each measure 24" x 24" so pretty big!
Here's the palette I pretty much stuck to for the painting part of the process...
And here's what one of the butterflies looked like after drawing it on canvas, cutting it out & taping it down to the board. The swatch to the right was my practice piece to get a feel for the direction I wanted to take.
Here's a close up of one of them after painting it. This one I call the "pink" butterfly, and it's the one with lots & lots of splatters! One of my favorite mark making techniques ... mostly because my inner child Jessie gets to play!
After painting, here's what the pink one looks like. As you can see at this point, I've cut the canvas into separate sections for each butterfly wing and for the body/head...
And here's what the blue one looks like...
After cutting the wings & body into individual sections, I drew a pattern for each wing and as you will see in a minute, each one was cut into multiple sections.
This was scary to cut up my painting into so many pieces! On the left is what the patterns looked like...
And here's a close up of one of the wings after I chopped it up...
And here's a butterfly completely cut into its final sections...
After priming a 24" x 24" cradled wood panel with about 3 layers of pure white encaustic wax, and after an extreme amount of marking & measuring to get it right! ... I then dipped each piece into clear encaustic wax and after placing it where intended, fused it with a heat gun which "glues" it to the wax beneath.
[Dad was very handy with tools, extremely brilliant with carpentry, and he said many times to me when I got to assist him in his renovation du jour, "measure twice, cut once" which is an old carpenter's saying he used often. In this case I measured MORE than twice & hallelujiah ... glued once!!! He'd be proud ;-)]
Here's what the blue one looks like after all the pieces are glued into place....
The next step was to take my handy dandy bamboo stick & carve out the next layer of wings by making a curved line parallel to the edge of the painted wings...
I then put a couple layers of clear encaustic wax on this new section and also on the "veins" between the wings...
And after fusing this newly added wax, I carved out the excess, which gave a more 3D look to the new area & also to the veins...
On this new raised 3D area, I began painting it with gold metallic watercolor paint ... which I love! It does take some patience, as initially the watercolor will resist the wax.
But thru patience (not my super power) and a bit of perseverance (my kind-of super-power-on-good-days) as you'll see in the next photo, the watercolor eventually clings to the wax...
Here's a couple of photos where you can see the watercolor in the later stages dried & clinging to the wax...
I then hit the newly painted gold with a heat gun to fuse it into the wax. It will not budge once this fusing is done! The watercolor & the wax are now one & the same, and a permanent bond is made. Cool, huh?!
After I finished painting the wings, I noticed that the gold was not popping against the white wax as much as I would have liked. It called for another color to give it some contrast, so I smudged some pan pastel color around the edges of each wing (pan pastels are like the artist version of eye shadow, you can even apply them with one of those little sponge applicators, which I did.)
I decided to use two different shades of purple, one more towards the blue side since Mom liked periwinkle blue, and the other towards the red side in honor of my Dad's love of red ;-)
After smudging it around I indulged the OCD side of me and carved a nice smooth curved line thru it parallel to the edge of the wings...
Then I used a clay tool to scrape back the excess and a light fuse with the heat gun to smooth everything out...
After that I carved another curved line around the wings to preserve some of that gorgeous bright white wax!
And then my inner child got to come back out and finger paint gold metallic oil paint around the edges...
Then she went outside to play while I added a crackle effect to the gold paint with a heat gun...
And then came my favorite part, adding a hand-colored red heart to each one in honor of my folks...
Here are the completed two 24" x 24" newest (and last) pieces in this collection...
Honor Thy Father and Mother: Pinkie
24" x 24" watercolor & encaustic
on sustainably harvested cradled wood panel
Honor Thy Father and Mother: Blue Boy
24" x 24" watercolor & encaustic
on sustainably harvested cradled wood panel
Did you notice I decided to title these two "Pinkie" and "Blue Boy"? I had a flashback when I started referring to these as "the pink one" and "the blue one" ... All of a sudden I remembered the prints of these two great paintings named the same, that hung in my grandparents' home next to their bedroom closet door all of my childhood!
Here they are in case you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about...
So I said, what the heck? Let's honor them too! Thus, the title of these two butterfly pieces.
Hope you've enjoyed watching this process unfold. As always, I'd love to chat art with you in the comments below! Thanks for tuning in ❤❤❤